Mark Steyn: Don’t insult DMV by comparing it to Obamacare

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If you’re looking for an epitaph for the republic (and these days,
who isn’t?) try this – from August 2010 and TechCrunch’s delirious
preview of healthcare.gov:
“We were working in a very very nimble hyper-consumer-focused way,”
explained Todd Park, the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services, “all fused in this kind of maelstrom of
pizza, Mountain Dew and all-nighters … and, you know, idealism. That
kind of led to the magic that was produced.”
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Wow. Think of the magic that Madison, Hamilton, and the rest of those
schlubs could have produced if they’d only had pizza and Mountain Dew
and been willing to pull a few all-nighters at Philadelphia in 1787.
Somewhere between the idealism and the curling slice of last night’s
pepperoni, Macon Phillips, the administration’s Director of New Media,
happened to come across a Tweet by Edward Mullen of Jersey City in which
he Twitpicced his design for what a health-insurance exchange could
look like. So Phillips printed it out to show his fellow administration
officials: “Look, this is the sort of creativity that is out there,” he
said. “One thing led to another, and he left Jersey City to come to D.C.
and helped push us through an information architectural process.”
.

Don’t you just love it! This is way cooler than the decline and fall
of the Roman Empire: The only “architectural process” they had was
crumbling viaducts. I think we can all agree that Barack Obama is hipper
than all other government leaders anywhere, ever, combined.
Unfortunately, the dogs bark and the pizza-delivery bike moves on, and,
in the cold grey morning after of the grease-stained cardboard box with
the rubberized cheese stuck to it, Obamacare wound up somewhat less
hipper and, in fact, not even HIPAA – the unpersuasively groovy acronym
for federally mandated medical privacy in America. Appearing before
Congress on Thursday, the magicians of Obamacare eventually conceded
that, on their supposedly HIPAA-compliant database, deep in the
“information architectural process” is a teensy-weensy little bit of
“source code” that reads, “You have no reasonable expectation of privacy
regarding any communication of any data transmitted or stored on this
information system.”
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Democrat members of the House committee professed to be bewildered at
why anyone would be either surprised or upset to discover that his
information can be shared with anyone in the federal government,
including a corrupt and diseased IRS that uses what confidential
information it can acquire to torment perceived ideological enemies.
And, at a certain level, the more blasé of the people’s representatives,
such as New Jersey’s Frank Pallone, have a point: if Obama thinks
nothing of tapping Angela Merkel’s cellphone (as she had cause to
complain to him Wednesday, in what was said to be a “cool” conversation,
and not in the hepcat sense), why would he extend any greater privacy
rights to your Auntie Mabel?
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Incidentally, do you think we need a congressional oversight
committee to look into the effectiveness of congressional oversight
committees? Every time I’m stuck at Gate 37 and glance up at the 24/7
Wolf Blitzer channel, there’s somebody testifying about something:
Benghazi … Lois Lerner … Obamacare … No one gets fired, no agency gets
closed, nothing changes.
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The witness who coughed up the intriguing tidbit about Obamacare’s
exemption from privacy protections was one Cheryl Campbell of something
called CGI. This rang a vague bell with me. CGI is not a creative free
spirit from Jersey City with an impressive mastery of Twitter, but a
Canadian corporate behemoth. Indeed, CGI is so Canadian, their name is
French: Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique. Their most famous
government project was for the Canadian Firearms Registry. The registry
was estimated to cost in total $119 million, which would be offset by
$117 million in fees. That’s a net cost of $2 million. Instead, by 2004
the CBC (Canada’s PBS) was reporting costs of some $2 billion – or a
thousand times more expensive.
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Yeah, yeah, I know, we’ve all had bathroom remodelers like that. But
in this case the database had to register some 7 million long guns
belonging to some 2.5 million to 3 million Canadians. That works out to
almost $300 per gun – or somewhat higher than the original estimate for
processing a firearm registration of $4.60. Of those $300 gun
registrations, Canada’s Auditor-General reported to Parliament that much
of the information was either duplicated or wrong in respect to basic
information such as names and addresses.
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Sound familiar?
Also, there was a 1-800 number, but it wasn’t any use.
Sound familiar?
So it was decided that the sclerotic database needed to be improved.
Sound familiar?
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But it proved impossible to “improve” CFIS (the Canadian Firearms
Information System). So CGI was hired to create an entirely new CFIS II,
which would operate alongside CFIS I until the old system could be
scrapped. CFIS II was supposed to go operational on Jan. 9, 2003, but
the January date got postponed to June, and 2003 to 2004, and $81
million was thrown at it before a new Conservative government scrapped
the fiasco in 2007. Last year, the Government of Ontario canceled
another CGI registry that never saw the light of day – just for one
disease, diabetes, and costing a mere $46 million.
.
But there’s always America! “We continue to view U.S. Federal
Government as a significant growth opportunity,” declared CGI’s chief
exec, in what would also make a fine epitaph for the republic. Pizza and
Mountain Dew isn’t very Montreal, and, on the evidence of three years
of missed deadlines in Ontario and the four-year overrun on the firearms
database, CGI don’t sound like they’re pulling that many all-nighters.
Was the Government of the United States aware that CGI had been fired by
the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario (and the
Government of New Brunswick)? Nobody’s saying. But I doubt it would make
much difference. Asked by Mother Jones to explain why Obama the
candidate uses the Internet so effectively but Obama the government is a
bust, his 2008 tech maestro, Clay Johnson, put it this way: “The first
person that you need in order to start a web company would be a web
developer; the first person you need to start a government contracting
firm is an attorney.” The problem with Obamacare isn’t the website
design, it’s the nature of government procurement in an unaccountable
bureaucracy serving 300 million people.
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Despite the best efforts of President Obama and doting Tweeters in
Jersey City, government isn’t groovy. The standard rap on Obamacare is
that it’s turned America’s health system into the DMV. If only. I had
cause to go to the DMV in Twin Mountain, New Hampshire, the other day.
In and out in 10 minutes. Modest accommodations, a little down-at-heel,
nothing cool about it at all. But it worked just fine. Friendly chap, no
complaints. Government can do that at the town level, county level,
even (more sparingly) at the state level.
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But a national medical regime for 300 million people? Not in a First
World country. And, when you’re mad enough to try it, the failure is not
the insignificant enrollment numbers, but the vaporization of the
existing health plans of 119,000 Pennsylvanians, 160,000 Californians,
300,000 Floridians, 800,000 in that tech Tweeter’s New Jersey. That’s
the magic that happens when you disdain the limits of prosaic, humdrum,
just-about-functioning government.
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Thursday, October 24, 2013

By JAMES FREEMAN

Recent
headlines say that President Obama succeeded in breaking the debt limit
to allow federal borrowing beyond $17 trillion. But Stanley
Druckenmiller, one of the most successful money managers of all time,
says "there's just one little problem" with Washington's math.
"Everyone's running around saying the debt is $17 trillion," notes Mr.
Druckenmiller. But the government can acknowledge that titanic burden on
future generations only by ignoring even larger obligations.

"If
you borrow money from an individual with the agreement to pay them back
in benefit payments in Social Security and Medicare after the age of
65, in their brilliance the United States accounting experts call that
revenues," says Mr. Druckenmiller. "But in any corporation in
America—other than maybe Enron—if you borrow money from someone with the
agreement to pay it back in the future, that's called a debt." And
these future commitments don't appear on Uncle Sam's balance sheet.

What's
the real burden when you count these promises? Taking the "alternative
fiscal scenario" from the Congressional Budget Office, which still
understates the problem but is the closest Washington gets to reality,
Mr. Druckenmiller calculates the net present value of Beltway
commitments. He concludes that "the future liabilities are $205
trillion, not 17." It's a staggering sum, roughly 12 times the size of
the U.S. economy.

Mr.
Druckenmiller notes that he's counting up all the federal promises from
here to eternity, while others prefer to focus on shorter time
horizons. And to be sure, investors in U.S. Treasury debt have a legal
claim to repayment whereas future retirees have only promises from
politicians. But that doesn't make the need for reform any less urgent.

.

.

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The problem is the debt, not the debt ceiling

FOR WEEKS we've been told that if Congress doesn't raise the federal debt ceiling by Thursday, the government will go into default and the world as we know it will spin out of control.
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The predictions of doom have been hysterical. Bloomberg reported that
a US default would be the first by a major Western government "since Nazi Germany 80 years ago." Warren Buffett compared debt-ceiling politics to weapons of mass destruction
— "like nuclear bombs, basically too horrible to use." President Obama,
saying he was quoting "CEOs and economists," told a White House news
conference that failing to raise the debt ceiling would be "insane, catastrophic, chaos." And the Treasury Department issued a grim warning that
a default could prove calamitous: "Credit markets could freeze, the
value of the dollar could plummet … and there might be a financial
crisis and recession that could echo the events of 2008 or worse."
.
.

For more than 30 years, under
Republicans and Democrats alike, Congress has repeatedly chosen to lift
the federal debt limit rather than control spending and decrease the
national debt. (Graphic: Veronique de Rugy, Mercatus Center at George Mason University).

Call me a Pollyanna, but I'm quite sure none of that will happen.
Whether or not a debt-ceiling deal is finalized this week, the
government of the United States isn't going to default on its debt. For
all the scaremongering, the stock market doesn't seem to be panicking:
The Dow rose smartly last week, and closed up again on Monday. An Associated Press story was headlined:
"As US default nears, investors shrug off threat." Maybe that's because
investors — or for that matter anyone with a Mastercard or a
home-equity line of credit — know perfectly well that the Treasury is
not going to welsh on its debt obligations.
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Hitting a credit-card limit doesn't mean a borrower has become a
deadbeat; it means he has to pay down some of the principal before
making new charges on that card. The more of his debt he pays off, the
more his credit score improves. In similar fashion, the federal
government will not be forced to stiff its bondholders if Congress
doesn't raise the statutory debt limit this week. Granted, it will only
be able to spend what it collects in taxes. But the IRS takes in around
$2.3 trillion per year, or about 10 times the amount needed to service
the nation's nearly $17 trillion national debt.
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No wonder Moody's hasn't been spooked
by Washington's debt-ceiling soap opera. "We believe the government
would continue to pay interest and principal on its debt even in the
event that the debt limit is not raised, leaving its creditworthiness
intact," the credit-rating agency serenely forecast last week. "The debt
limit restricts government expenditures to the amount of its incoming
revenues; it does not prohibit the government from servicing its debt.
There is no direct connection between the debt limit … and a default."
.

The real threat to America's national interest isn't a debt ceiling that won't go up. It's a national debt that won't stop going up.
.

In recent weeks the president has been shamelessly hyping the horrors
that will supposedly ensue if he doesn't get his way on raising the
debt ceiling. He was on stronger ground as a presidential candidate in
2008, when he condemned George W. Bush
for "driving up our national debt from $5 trillion … [to] over $9
trillion." Such a deluge of red ink was "irresponsible" and
"unpatriotic," Obama said; as president he vowed to stem it. One month
into his first term, convening a White House summit on fiscal
responsibility, he delivered a message any Tea Party conservative could have applauded:
.

"Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in Washington these past few
years, we cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences,"
the new president insisted. "I refuse to leave our children with a debt
that they cannot repay."
.

But the prevailing wisdom prevailed.
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In the nearly five years since Obama took office, the national debt
has soared to $17 trillion, a sum that would have been unfathomable as
recently as a decade ago. Federal debt in public hands now equals nearly
three-fourths of GDP. Except for World War II, that is higher than it has ever been.
We are up to our nostrils in debt, struggling to keep our heads above
water, and all the while Washington heaps scorn on those who suggest
that authorizing still more debt, to finance even more spending, will
only make things worse.
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... Last week I wrote a column
accusing the president of having a vindictive streak — of deliberately
trying to make the lives of average Americans worse just so he could
score ideological and political points.
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We already knew from how
he handled the budget sequester that Obama liked this approach. He
ordered Cabinet secretaries not to do their jobs — i.e., to manage as
best they could under spending restraints — but instead to find ways to
make the cuts needlessly painful for innocents caught in the Beltway
crossfire.
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They dusted off the same playbook for the shutdown. As one park ranger told the Washington Times, “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can.”

.

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Admittedly, the case was circumstantial. There was no smoking gun. What was really needed was a confession.
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Obama
delivered. On October 8, Obama was asked by Mark Knoller of CBS if he
was “tempted” to sign the numerous funding bills passed by the
GOP-controlled House that would greatly alleviate the pain of the
shutdown. Republicans have voted to reopen parks, fund cancer trials for
children at the NIH, and to keep FEMA and the FDA going through this
partial shutdown. But Obama has threatened to veto any such efforts,
effectively keeping the Senate from considering the legislation.“Of
course I’m tempted” to sign those bills, Obama explained. “But here’s
the problem. What you’ve seen are bills that come up wherever
Republicans are feeling political pressure, they put a bill forward. And
if there’s no political heat, if there’s no television story on it,
then nothing happens.”.
Obama’s answer dragged on, as all of
Obama’s answers do. But the point was made. For the first time in
American history, a president confessed to deliberately hurting his
country to score points against his enemies.
.

Which brings us to
the national disgrace this week in which the Department of Defense
denied death benefits to the families of fallen service members.
.

White
House press secretary Jay Carney insists, with operatic righteousness,
that Obama never intended for the 26 families of the fallen to be denied
this aid or to be hindered from retrieving their beloveds’ remains from
Dover Air Force Base.
.

But Carney is surely lying — and the evidence isn’t simply that his lips are moving.
Carney
defends the administration by noting that the Pentagon warned Congress
in late September that the shutdown would prevent the payments from
going out.
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But Congress passed the Pay Our Military Act to fund
the military through the shutdown. Administration officials first
stonewalled Congress’s efforts for clarity on the issue, then the
lawyers eventually determined that because the act didn’t specifically
include the word “benefits,” they couldn’t err on the side of helping
grieving families.
.

In other words, when asked to make a judgment
call, and knowing that Congress wanted the benefits paid, this
administration still claimed its hands were tied by the fine print.
Given how often the White House routinely ignores the plain meaning of
the law — and the will of Congress — when it suits its political agenda,
logic dictates that it denied the benefits on purpose.
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Moreover,
by its own account, the White House says it knew for weeks this would
happen. During all the back-and-forth, the White House did nothing to
remedy the situation. It only sprang into outraged action when suddenly
faced with a PR nightmare.
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“The president was very disturbed to
learn of this problem,” Carney told the press Wednesday. And once he did
learn of it, Carney insisted, he ordered the Defense Department and the
Office of Management and Budget to fix the problem “today.”
.

When
Fox News White House correspondent Ed Henry asked Carney when the
president found out, Carney indignantly refused to answer. It’s not hard
to guess why: because the president either knew all along, or his
underlings believed they were following his plan.
.

Let me say it
again. The president confessed. It’s his express policy to punish
innocent bystanders in order to score partisan points. That order has
gone forth like a fatwa to the bureaucracy. And it is only when that
policy blows up in his face that Obama becomes “very disturbed.”
.

When
terrible things happened on George W. Bush’s watch — Katrina, Abu
Ghraib, etc. — the immediate liberal response was to insist that Bush
had in fact ordered or wanted the terrible things to happen.
.

If
a government shuts down in the forest and nobody hears it, that’s the
sound of liberty dying. The so-called shutdown is, as noted last week,
mostly baloney: Eighty-three percent of the supposedly defunded
government is carrying on as usual, impervious to whatever restraints
the people’s representatives might wish to impose, and the 800,000
soi-disant “non-essential” workers have been assured that, as soon as
the government is once again lawfully funded, they will be paid in full
for all the days they’ve had at home.
.

But the one place where a
full-scale shutdown is being enforced is in America’s alleged “National
Park Service,” a term of art that covers everything from canyons and
glaciers to war memorials and historic taverns. The NPS has spent the
last two weeks behaving as the paramilitary wing of the DNC, expending
more resources in trying to close down open-air, unfenced areas than it
would normally do in keeping them open. It began with the war memorials
on the National Mall — that’s to say, stone monuments on pieces of grass
under blue sky. It’s the equivalent of my New Hampshire town government
shutting down and deciding therefore to ring the Civil War statue on
the village common with yellow police tape and barricades.
.

Still, the NPS could at least argue that these monuments were
within their jurisdiction — although they shouldn’t be. Not content with
that, the NPS shock troops then moved on to insisting that privately
run sites such as the Claude Moore Colonial Farm and privately owned
sites such as Mount Vernon were also required to shut. When the Pisgah
Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway declined to comply with the government’s
order to close (an entirely illegal order, by the way), the “shut down”
Park Service sent armed agents and vehicles to blockade the hotel’s
driveway.

.
Even then, the problem with a lot of America’s scenic
wonders is that, although they sit on National Park Service land,
they’re visible from some distance. So, in South Dakota, having closed
Mount Rushmore the NPS storm troopers additionally attempted to close
the view of Mount Rushmore — that’s to say a stretch of the
highway, where the shoulder widens and you can pull over and admire the
stony visages of America’s presidents. Maybe it’s time to blow up
Washington, Jefferson & Co. and replace them with a giant, granite
sign rising into the heavens bearing the chiseled inscription
.
“DON’T
EVEN THINK OF PARKING DOWN THERE.”
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But perhaps the most
extraordinary story to emerge from the NPS is that of the tour group of
foreign seniors whose bus was trapped in Yellowstone Park on the day the
shutdown began. They were pulled over photographing a herd of bison
when an armed ranger informed them, with the insouciant ad-hoc
unilateral lawmaking to which the armed bureaucrat is distressingly
prone, that taking photographs counts as illegal “recreation.” “Sir, you
are recreating,” the ranger informed the tour guide. And we can’t have
that, can we? They were ordered back to the Old Faithful Inn, next to
the geyser of the same name, but forbidden to leave said inn to look at
said geyser. Armed rangers were posted at the doors, and, just in case
one of the wily Japanese or Aussies managed to outwit his captors by
escaping through one of the inn’s air ducts and down to the geyser, a
fleet of NPS SUVs showed up every hour and a half throughout the day,
ten minutes before Old Faithful was due to blow, to surround the geyser
and additionally ensure that any of America’s foreign visitors trying to
photograph the impressive natural phenomenon from a second-floor hotel
window would still wind up with a picture full of government officials.
The following morning the bus made the two-and-a-half-hour journey to
the park boundary but was prevented from using any of the bathrooms en
route, including at a private dude ranch whose owner was threatened with
the loss of his license if he allowed any tourist to use the
facilities.
.
At
the same time as the National Park Service was holding legal foreign
visitors under house arrest, it was also allowing illegal immigrants to
hold a rally on the supposedly closed National Mall. At this bipartisan
amnesty bash, the Democrat House minority leader Nancy Pelosi said she
wanted to “thank the president for enabling us to gather here” and
Republican congressman Mario Diaz-Balart also expressed his gratitude to
the administration for “allowing us to be here.”
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.
Is this for
real? It’s not King Barack’s land; it’s supposed to be the people’s
land, and his most groveling and unworthy subjects shouldn’t require a
dispensation by His Benign Majesty to set foot on it. It is disturbing
how easily large numbers of Americans lapse into a neo-monarchical
prostration that few subjects of actual monarchies would be comfortable
with these days. But then in actual monarchies the king takes a more
generous view of “public lands.” Two years after Magna Carta, in 1217,
King Henry III signed the Charter of the Forest, which despite various
amendments and replacement statutes remained in force in Britain for
some three-quarters of a millennium, until the early Seventies. If Magna
Carta is a landmark in its concept of individual rights, the Forest
Charter played an equivalent role in advancing the concept of the
commons, the public space. Repealing various restrictions by his
predecessors, Henry III opened the royal forests to the freemen of
England, granted extensive grazing and hunting rights, and eliminated
the somewhat severe penalty of death for taking the king’s venison. The
NPS have not yet fried anyone for taking King Barack’s deer, but it is
somewhat sobering to reflect that an English peasant enjoyed more
freedom on the sovereign’s land in the 13th century than a freeborn
American does on “the people’s land” in the 21st century.
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.
And we’re talking about a lot more acreage: Forty percent of the
state of California is supposedly federal land, and thus officially
closed to the people of the state. The geyser stasi of the National Park
Service have in effect repealed the Charter of the Forest. President
Obama and his enforcers have the same concept of the royal forest that
King John did. The government does not own this land; the Park Service
are merely the janitorial staff of “we the people” (to revive an
obsolescent concept). No harm will befall the rocks and rivers by
posting a sign at the entrance saying “No park ranger on duty during
government shutdown. Proceed beyond this point at your own risk.” And,
at the urban monuments, you don’t even need that: It is disturbing that
minor state officials even presume to have the right to prevent the
citizenry walking past the Vietnam Wall.

.

I wonder what those
Japanese and Australian tourists prevented from photographing bison or
admiring a geyser make of U.S. claims to be “the land of the free.” When
a government shutdown falls in the forest, Americans should listen very
carefully. The government is telling you something profound and
important about how it understands the power relationship between them
and you.
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A Letter to President Obama

As the temporary slowdown in government operations enters its second
week, I write to explain why conservatives have insisted on making the
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act the prime source of
contention. Speaking for our organization, I can tell you we’re in this
fight because of the harm the law is inflicting on Americans across the
country.
.

We are fighting for people like Michael Cerpok, a leukemia patient in
Arizona, who recently learned he will lose his current health insurance
due to this misguided law. He notes that “my $4,500 out-of-pocket
[expense] is going to turn into a minimum of $26,000 out-of-pocket to
see the doctor that I’ve been seeing the last seven years,” and he
worries that he and his wife might need to take second jobs to stay
afloat.
.

We are fighting for people like California resident Tom Waschura, who
voted for you twice, yet was shocked by the higher premium bill he
recently received in the mail. Tom’s insurance rates will go up by
almost $10,000 for him and his family. He fears that these higher
premiums will harm his family, and jobs in his area: “When you take
$10,000 out of my family’s pocket each year, that’s otherwise disposable
income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local
economy.”
.

We are fighting for people like Rod Coons and Florence Peace, a
retired Indiana couple satisfied with their current coverage. “I’d
prefer to stay with our current plan because it meets our needs,” says
Rod. But their plan isn’t government-approved under Obamacare’s new
rules, so Rod and Florence are losing their health insurance plan at the
end of this year.
.

You have claimed that Obamacare has nothing to do with the budget.
But over the next decade, this widely unpopular program will add nearly
$1.8 trillion in new federal spending—and will cost taxpayers trillions
more beyond that, making it nearly impossible to balance the federal
budget. What’s more, for millions of struggling Americans, the law will
crush their family budgets due to fewer work hours, lost jobs, and
higher premiums. With the economy still mired in a scattered and
sluggish recovery, these people deserve relief from Obamacare—and they
deserve it now.
.

Your Administration has already granted numerous waivers and
exemptions during the three years since the law was passed. Millions of
union members received temporary waivers from the law’s costly benefit
requirements. Big businesses have received a one-year delay from the
onerous employer mandate—a delay your Health and Human Services
Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, struggled to defend in an interview
earlier this week. And Members of Congress have obtained special
treatment for themselves and their staffs—illegally—that allows them to
continue to receive taxpayer-funded insurance subsidies.
.

At a time when so many Americans are suffering because of the rollout
of this new law, I remain puzzled by your failure to acknowledge the
faults caused by this unfair, unworkable, and unpopular measure. We
believe the law should be fully repealed, but at minimum, both sides
should agree not to fund the law for one year—a “time-out” that would
halt the law’s most harmful effects before they start.
.

Even though Democrats have thus far refused to negotiate on anything
related to the current government slowdown, millions of citizens need
relief from this law. I encourage you and your Administration to work
with Congress on ways to stop Obamacare from harming the American people
and the American economy.
.
.
.
All the best,
Senator Jim DeMint

Way back in January, when it emerged that Beyoncé had treated us to
the first-ever lip-synched national anthem at a presidential
inauguration, I suggested in this space that this strange
pseudo-performance embodied the decay of America’s political
institutions from the real thing into mere simulacrum. But that applies
to government “crises,” too – such as the Obamacare “rollout,” the debt
“ceiling,” and the federal “shutdown,” to name only the three current
railroad tracks to which the virtuous damsel of Big Government has been
simultaneously tied by evil mustache-twirling Republicans.
.

This
week’s “shutdown” of government, for example, suffers (at least for
those of us curious to see it reduced to Somali levels) from the awkward
fact that the overwhelming majority of the government is not shut down
at all. Indeed, much of it cannot be shut down. Which is the
real problem facing America. “Mandatory spending” (Social Security,
Medicare, et al) is authorized in perpetuity – or, at any rate, until
total societal collapse. If you throw in the interest payments on the
debt, that means two-thirds of the federal budget is beyond the control
of Congress’s so-called federal budget process. That’s why you’re
reading government “shutdown” stories about the Panda Cam at the
Washington Zoo and the first lady’s ghost-Tweeters being furloughed.
.

Nevertheless, just because it’s a phony crisis doesn’t mean it can’t
be made even phonier. The perfect symbol of the shutdown-simulacrum so
far has been the World War II Memorial. This is an open-air facility on
the National Mall – that’s to say, an area of grass with a monument at
the center. By comparison with, say, the IRS, the National Parks Service
is not usually one of the more controversial government agencies. But,
come “shutdown,” they’re reborn as the shock troops of the punitive
bureaucracy. Thus, they decided to close down an unfenced open-air site –
which, oddly enough, requires more personnel to shut than it would to
keep it open.

.

So the Parks Service dispatched their own vast army
to the World War II Memorial to ring it with barricades and yellow
“Police Line – Do Not Cross” tape strung out like the world’s longest
“We Support Our Troops” ribbon. For good measure, they issued a warning
that anybody crossing the yellow line would be liable to arrest – or
presumably, in extreme circumstances, the same multibullet ventilation
that that mentally ill woman from Connecticut wound up getting from the
coppers. In a heartening sign that the American spirit is not entirely
dead, at least among a small percentage of nonagenarians, a visiting
party of veterans pushed through the barricades and went to honor their
fallen comrades, mordantly noting for reporters that, after all, when
they’d shown up on the beach at Normandy, it, too, had not been
officially open.

.

One would not be altogether surprised to find the
feds stringing yellow police tape along the Rio Grande, the 49th
Parallel and the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, if only to keep Americans
in, rather than anybody else out. Still, I would like to have been privy
to the high-level discussions at which the government took the decision
to install its Barrycades on open parkland. For anyone with a modicum
of self-respect, it’s difficult to imagine how even the twerpiest of
twerp bureaucrats would consent to stand at a crowd barrier and tell a
group of elderly soldiers who’ve flown in from across the country that
they’re forbidden to walk across a piece of grass and pay their
respects. Yet, if any National Parks Service employee retained enough
sense of his own humanity to balk at these instructions or other
spiteful, petty closures of semiwilderness fishing holes and the like,
we’ve yet to hear about it.

.

The World War II Memorial exists
thanks to some $200 million in private donations – plus $15 million or
so from Washington: In other words, the feds paid for the grass. But the
thug usurpers of the bureaucracy want to send a message: In today’s
America, everything is the gift of the government, and exists only at
the government’s pleasure, whether it’s your health insurance, your
religious liberty, or the monument to your fallen comrades. The
Barrycades are such a perfect embodiment of what James Piereson calls
“punitive liberalism” they should be tied round Obama’s neck forever, in
the way that “ketchup is a vegetable” got hung around Reagan-era
Republicans. Alas, the court eunuchs of the Obama media cannot rouse
themselves even on behalf of the nation’s elderly warriors.

.

Meanwhile,
Republicans offered a bill to prevent the shutdown affecting
experimental cancer trials for children. The Democrats rejected it. “But
if you can help one child who has cancer,” CNN’s Dana Bash asked Harry
Reid, “why wouldn’t you do it?”

.

“Why would we want to do that?”
replied the Senate Majority Leader, denouncing Miss Bash’s question as
“irresponsible.” For Democrats, the budget is all or nothing. Republican
bills to fund this or that individual program have to be rejected out
of hand as an affront to the apparent constitutional inviolability of
the “continuing resolution.” In fact, government by “continuing
resolution” is a sleazy racket: The legislative branch is supposed to
legislate. Instead, they’re presented with a yea-or-nay vote on a single
all-or-nothing multitrillion-dollar band-aid stitched together behind
closed doors to hold the federal leviathan together while it belches its
way through to the next budget cycle. As Professor Angelo Codevilla of
Boston University put it, “This turns democracy into a choice between
tyranny and anarchy.” It’s certainly a perversion of responsible
government: Congress has less say over specific federal expenditures
than the citizens of my New Hampshire backwater do at Town Meeting over
the budget for a new fence at the town dump. Pace Sen. Reid, Republican
proposals to allocate spending through targeted, mere
multibillion-dollar appropriations is not only not “irresponsible” but,
in fact, a vast improvement over the “continuing resolution”: To modify
Lord Acton, power corrupts, but continuing power corrupts continually.

.

America
has no budget process. That’s why it’s the brokest nation in history.
So a budgeting process that can’t control the budget in a legislature
that can’t legislate leads to a government shutdown that shuts down open
areas of grassland and the unmanned boat launch on the Bighorn River in
Montana. Up next: the debt ceiling showdown, in which we argue over
everything except the debt. The conventional wisdom of the U.S. media is
that Republicans are being grossly irresponsible not just to wave
through another couple trillion or so on Washington’s overdraft
facility. Really? Other countries are actually reducing debt: New
Zealand, for example, has a real budget that diminishes net debt from 26
percent of GDP to 17 percent by 2020. By comparison, America’s net debt
is currently about 88 percent of GDP, and we’re debating only whether
to increase it automatically or with a few ineffectual strings attached.

.

My
favorite book of the moment is “The Liberty Amendments,” the new
bestseller by Mark Levin – not because I agree with all his proposed
constitutional amendments, and certainly not because I think they
represent the views of a majority of Americans, but because he’s
fighting on the right battleground. A century of remorseless expansion
by the “federal” government has tortured the constitutional order beyond
meaning. America was never intended to be a homogenized
one-size-fits-all nation of 300 million people run by a government as
centralized as France’s. It’s no surprise that, when it tries to be one,
it doesn’t work terribly well.

Is there any hope for increasing the participation of Jews in the Republican Party? Should there be?

.

The Pew Research Study on American Jews released this week
presents a stark view of the spiritual lives of our community today. The
intermarriage rate is up to 58% and secularism is rampant – all worthy
of attention in its time. Politically, 70% of Jews are or lean to the
Democrats, while 22% of Jews are or lean to the Republicans. That is
completely out of sync with the rest of America, which favors Democrats
49-36%, although other studies show a much closer tally. The Pew
findings mirror the election results from 2012, in which Jews favored
Obama over Romney by 69-30%.
The gap is enormous.
.

At a Republican Jewish Coalition forum I moderated last night, two
Republicans of note – Ari Fleischer (former Press Secretary to President
Bush) and Matt Brooks (longtime head of the RJC) shared their views on
the past and future of the Republican Party and its search for support
in the Jewish community. Both are seasoned, articulate political
professionals, and both defy the media stereotype of Republicans as
greedy, heartless oligarchs.
.

The Jewish vote has not been in play for Republicans for almost a
century. Abraham Lincoln was greatly admired by Jews; many actually
called him Father Abraham, and some assumed he was Jewish. His greatness
and decency steered Jewish votes to his Republican Party. For a
half-century after Lincoln’s assassination, the Jewish vote was evenly
split, similar to other ethnic groups. That changed abruptly.
.

The last Republican president who won a majority of the Jewish vote
was Warren Gamaliel Harding in the election of 1920. (Actually, a
plurality; Harding won 43% of the Jewish vote, to the Democrat James
Davis’ 19%. The balance went to the Socialist Eugene V. Debs, who
garnered 38% of the Jewish vote while running his campaign from a prison
cell.) Debs’ success augured a seismic shift to the far left in Jewish
political attitudes and voting patterns. Since then, the Jewish vote for
the Democratic candidate has never fallen below 60% and has reached as
high as 90%, averaging 79%, with the one outlier the Reagan defeat of
Carter in 1980. Even then, Carter received 45% of the Jewish vote to
Reagan’s 39%.
.

The other outlier in the Pew data is the Orthodox support of the
Republican Party. Orthodox Jews are or lean to the Republicans over the
Democrats by 57-36% (!), signifying not only a greater identification
with the ideas and values of the GOP but also an ever-growing chasm
between the Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jewish communities in lifestyle,
attitudes and Jewish identification. As the Orthodox proportion of the
Jewish population increases (both through natural growth and through the
attrition wrought by the assimilation and intermarriage of the
non-Orthodox), the best hope for Republican growth lies in the ongoing
secularization of the Jewish people that is robbing the Jewish world of
thinking, breathing, practicing and committed Jews. Sadly, what is good
for the Republicans is a catastrophe for the Jewish world as a whole.
.

That point was not raised at last night’s forum, which focused on an
analysis of past and future trends as well as current events. Both men
decried the inability of the recent Republican nominees to connect with
people, real people. Policies that work well in the abstract have to be
presented in a way in which real people understand how they will benefit
(e.g., from a job rather than a handout), just like failed policies
have to be exposed because of their harmful effects to real people and
not just as violations of the theories of the Austrian School of
Economics. As interesting as those are – all due respect to Friedrich
von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises – most people don’t relate to it, but
they do relate to the stories about real people.
.

That failing is on display now – and one other, see below – in the
showdown in DC. The Democrats and mainstream media are skilled at
portraying the hardships caused to people by the partial shutdown of the
government. Offices closed, workers unemployed and tourists
inconvenienced at the national parks and monuments are the staples of
news coverage. Interestingly, I polled last night’s audience of hundreds
and asked how many of them are affected by the government shutdown?
Five hands went up. Certainly, we grieve for anyone out of work even
temporarily, although that effect will be ameliorated, as in the past,
when the workers return to their offices and are reimbursed with all
their back pay. Even temporary unemployment is unsettling, as is the
need to access some legitimate function of government and to be turned
away. It was shocking, though, how few people in that audience felt any
effect at all from the government shutdown, ample testimony to the
virtues of limited government and the vices of a bloated bureaucracy.
Alas, in the Pew survey, Jews prefer a bigger government with more
services over a smaller government with fewer services by 54-38%.
.

Both men emphasized the traditional American values that have always
been embraced by the Republicans, and some that have dissipated that
must be revived if the Republican Party will continue to be viable. The
values of hard work, self-help and personal responsibility have taken a
hit in recent years. By the same token, Republicans have to shed the
label of being anti-immigrant, an accusation with which they have been
bludgeoned for years, and in part of the party, with some justification.
Romney’s missteps in this area cost him; the fact that Democrats tarred
him unfairly with being a ruthless tycoon who relishes firing people,
murdered a woman with cancer, and throws elderly women over cliffs,
didn’t help his cause either.
.

Both recognized that the past emphasis on social issues served more
to alienate potential supporters than to attract them, especially among
young people. The unresolved problem is that a good segment of the party
is motivated by the social issues, and tends to sit out elections
rather than vote for a less-than perfect nominee, even though that is a
foolish, counterproductive and self-defeating strategy.
.

Not unexpectedly, the audience was largely disappointed with the
Obama presidency, and not only for its failures of policy. The President
does not know how to lead – only to criticize and to decree. He feels
that he was elected dictator, not president, and so need not negotiate
with Republicans on anything. “I won,” period, oblivious to the reality
that the Republicans in the House also won, and with a greater share of
the vote that Obama received. And the poor messaging of the Republicans
fails to educate the public, as in the inability to counter the
President’s repeated assertion that the debt ceiling must be raised so
“we can pay our bills,” as if borrowing money to pay bills is actually
paying bills.
.

Ronald Reagan negotiated and compromised with Tip O’Neill like Bill
Clinton negotiated and compromised with Newt Gingrich in a way that
Obama refuses to with John Boehner. In effect, he has drawn a red line;
fortunately, Obama’s red lines have been known to fade in the past.
.

Asked by an audience member about Obama’s attitudes towards Israel,
Ari Fleischer replied, incisively, that in contrast to President Bush,
Obama does not perceive Israel “as a friend to be supported but as a
problem to be managed.” That is why the body language, the earlier
iciness, the bad optics and the policies have tended to the negative
–and why the fears in Israel are growing of a bogus US-Iran agreement
that echoes the failed agreements between the US and North Korea that
simply bought time for the North Koreans to complete their nuclear
program.
.

Is there a path to victory for the Republican Party, and a mechanism
to increase Jewish support? Parties out of power tend to look more
fractious and unruly. It was Will Rogers who said, back when the
Democrats were on the presidential outs, “I belong to no organized
political party. I am a Democrat.”
.

Today’s Republicans can relate. The cacophony of voices, disparate
ideas and solutions, and the multiplicity of wings and factions make the
party seem as ungovernable as the nation. But that rowdiness can also
be a sign of vitality and vigorous debate. A core remains that should
appeal to traditional Jews: personal responsibility, individual liberty,
limited government, public assistance not as an entitlement for all
eternity but to help the needy become independent and self-sufficient,
and a strong, respected America across the globe.
.
.
.

Party Politics

National Review's Happy Warrior
September 17, 2013

EX UN-AMBASSADOR SUSAN RICE WITH SOME OLD ACTOR
.
.
.
Prowling my hotel room the other night, I discovered a copy of the latest Vogue,
kindly provided by the management. So, after bringing myself up to
speed on Jennifer Lawrence — a "girl on fire," apparently — I turned to a
profile of Susan Rice.
.
.
She was the girl sent to put out the fire,
dispatched by the Obama administration to slog through all the Sunday
talk shows the weekend after Benghazi and blame it on some video. In Sir
Henry Wotton's famous formulation, an ambassador is a man sent to lie
abroad for the good of his country. In the case of Susan Rice, a U.N.
ambassador is a broad sent to lie to her country for the good of her man
— viz., Barack Obama. Happily, it worked. A year on, the director of
the video is still in custody, and Miss Rice is now national-security
adviser.
.
.
So she and Vogue were in party mood:
"It's a warm evening in June, and guests are assembling for a party
she's throwing in honor of LGBT Pride Month at the penthouse of the
Waldorf Towers, the official residence of the U.N. Ambassador. Actress
turned humanitarian activist Mia Farrow, wearing blue tinted glasses, is
one of the first to arrive. Within minutes she's joined by The New York Times's
executive editor, Jill Abramson . . ." And soon things are swinging:
"They mingle and sip sparkling wine in the elegant living room next to a
framed portrait of Oprah Winfrey and First Lady Michelle Obama resting
their heads on Rice's shoulders . . ."
.
.
Presumably Vogue subscribers are impressed by this sort of
thing, but it would seem an odd opening paragraph for a profile of even
recent U.N. ambassadors. Hey, maybe I'm wrong; maybe Vogue profiled cocktail soirées chez
John Bolton attended by Andie MacDowell or Valerie Bertinelli, and with
the great man photographed between Phil Donahue and Barbara Bush, or
Merv Griffin and Mamie Eisenhower. Who knows? Out there, in a ramshackle
outpost somewhere on the fringes of the map, brave Americans abandoned
by their government are dying on a rooftop. But here in the metropolis
the dazzling klieg-light luster of Mia Farrow and Jill Abramson plunges
all else into shadow.
.
.
If you're not looking at the world through Mia Farrow's blue-tinted
glasses, if you're in Beijing or Moscow, Ankara or Canberra, it's the
shadow that everyone sees, very clearly — the sepulchral Habsburgian
twilight of a dimming power enjoying its last waltz. Like Vienna exactly
a century ago, America retains a certain creative energy, if you're
willing to put Jay-Z up there with Franz Lehár. It is at the forefront
of therapeutic culture: If Freud had thought to stick his couch on a TV
set, he might have made as much dough as Oprah, or at least Dr. Phil. As
Vienna sat on an underground "river of sex" (as William Boyd calls it
in his recent novel Waiting for Sunrise), so in America the river
is overground and its Niagara-like roar the unceasing background din of
daily life: A New York mayoral candidate twitpics his penis. A putative
successor to San Diego's grope-fiend mayor is caught masturbating in a
city-hall men's room. Miley Cyrus in her scanties "twerks" — or is
twerked upon (I'm not sure I can reliably say which) — live on TV. Yawn.
Next . . .
.
.
No one could be further from the octogenarian Franz Josef than our
young emperor, but even hip courtiers draw the line at lèse majesté, and
so rodeo clowns who disrespect the sovereign are banned for life. On
the distant horizon, the contours of the post-American world begin to
rise, but the preoccupations of our ruling class grow ever more myopic.
One of the world's richest women flies all the way to Switzerland in
order to confuse a Zurich boutique selling $38,000 handbags with an
Alabama lunch counter 60 years ago, to the consternation of the poor
shopgirl who knows nothing of America's peculiar parochial obsessions,
has never heard of Trayvon Martin, and lives in a city where pretty much
the only black women around are the more fashion-conscious African
dictators' consorts in town to visit their safe-deposit boxes. But, as
at the Hofbau, the ancient social rituals of our own court permit no
diversion from the program: If it's Tuesday, it must be racism.
.
.
Alas, in the world beyond the penthouse of the Waldorf Towers, it's
harder to tell whom the A-list invites should go to: From Afghanistan to
Egypt, a debt-ridden America bankrolls its own eclipse, betraying
friends, promoting enemies, despised by both. In the dog days of summer,
the new national-security adviser tweets it in from her pad in the
Hamptons or wherever, even as the hyperpower readies for its next unwon
war: After America's slo-mo defeat in the Hindu Kush, and its
ineffectual leading-from-behind in Libya, and its thwarted Muslim
Brotherhood outreach in Cairo, Obama is confidently dispatching the
gunboats to Syria. If you're Bashar Assad, you must be as befuddled as
that Zurich handbag clerk: Hillary hailed you as a "reformer"; no
senatorial frequent flyer courted you more assiduously than John Kerry;
the guys trying to depose you hate the Great Satan far more than you do,
and are the local branch office of the fellows who turned lower
Manhattan into a big smoking hole. Yet Washington is readying to take
you out — or at any rate, in George W. Bush's unimprovable summation of
desultory Clinton-style warmongering, readying to fire a $2 million
cruise missile through a tent and hit a camel in the butt. The only
novelty with this latest of ineptly rattled sabers is whether Tsar Putin
will stand by and let Obama knock off a Russian client.*
.
.
Putin, Assad, General Sisi in Cairo, and many others think they have
the measure of Obama, Kerry, and Rice. Poor deluded fools. If only, like
Mia, they could see them through blue-tinted glasses . . .
.
.
.
*I wrote this piece for the last issue of National Review. Re Putin, we now know the answer.

...In a Bench Memos post, my friend Matt Franck objects to the contention in my column
for last weekend that the Constitution’s Origination Clause (Art. I,
Sec. 7) gives the House of Representatives primacy over spending as well
as taxing. Matt claims that my interpretation is bereft of historical
support, a defect I’m said to camouflage by an extravagant reading of an
“at best . . . ambiguous” passage in Madison’s Federalist No. 58.
.

It is Matt’s history, though, that is incomplete. As Mark Steyn observes,
there is a rich Anglo-American tradition of vesting authority over not
merely taxing but also spending in the legislative body closest to the
people. This tradition, stretching back nearly to the Magna Carta,
inspired the Origination Clause. It also informed Madison, whose
ruminations, besides being far from ambiguous on the House’s power of
the purse, are entitled to great weight — not only because he was among
the Constitution’s chief architects but also because his explication of
the Framers’ design helped induce skeptics of centralized government and
its tyrannical proclivities to adopt the Constitution.
.

Plainly, Matt is correct that the Origination Clause refers to “bills for raising revenue.” From the time it was debated
at the Philadelphia convention, however, the concept at issue clearly
referred to more than tax bills. It was about reposing in the people,
through their most immediately accountable representatives, the power of
the purse. Indeed, the term persistently used throughout the Framers’
debates was “money bills” — the phrase used by Elbridge Gerry, perhaps
the principal advocate of the Origination Clause, when (as the debate
records recount) he “moved to restrain the Senatorial branch from
originating money bills. The other branch [i.e., the House] was more
immediately the representatives of the people, and it was a maxim that
the people ought to hold the purse-strings.”
Matt portrays my
position as eccentric. Nevertheless, the belief that the Origination
Clause conveys the House’s holding of the purse strings — i.e., that it
refers to the output as well as the intake of government revenue — is
hardly unique to me. The Heritage Foundation’s Guide to the Constitution, for example, notes
that the clause was meant to be “consistent with the English
requirement that money bills must commence in the House of Commons.”
Traditionally, that requirement aggregated taxing with spending — the
“power over the purse” — which the Framers sought to repose “with the
legislative body closer to the people.”
.

Similarly, the Annenberg Institute for Civics, in its series on the Constitution, instructs students that the Clause means “the House of Representatives must begin the process when it comes to raising and spending money. It is the chamber where all taxing and spending bills
start” (emphasis added). To be sure, the lesson goes on to state that
“only the House may introduce a bill that involves taxes.” Yet this
obviously would not suffice to explain the conclusion that the House
must “begin the process” when “spending money” — as well as
raising money — is involved. That conclusion, like Madison’s, draws on
the fact that the Framers intended to mirror the venerable English
tradition of vesting the all-important power of the purse in the
people’s direct representatives.
.

Mark Steyn recounts
the Westminster practice, since the mid-17th-century reign of Charles
II, that the Commons would not permit the Lords to alter “money bills.”
In tracing the practice back much further, I am indebted to Nicholas
Schmitz, a Rhodes scholar and Marine veteran who has studied the ancient
Anglo roots of the Origination Clause. From his work I’ve learned that
it was already solidified custom by the reign of Richard II (1377–99)
that “grants” were the province of Commons, albeit, back then, “with the
assent of the Lords.”
.

“Grants” did not refer merely to the
extraction of assets by taxation; the term is also concerned with the
purpose to which these funds were to be put. England’s 1689 Bill of
Rights thus specified that a “grant of Parliament” was a necessary
precondition to “levying money for or to the use of the crown.” Such
grants were, in essence, appropriations. As the process evolved, the
House of Commons structured taxes strictly in accordance with the specific purposes cited by the crown. It was very much a two-sided ledger, with Commons jealously guarding its oversight of both money in and money out.
As
a number of the Framers were admirers of Locke, it is also worth
remembering Locke’s teaching that governments are formed to protect
private property. The concept stems, in part, from the (by then)
established understanding that the state could legitimately extract the
citizen’s property only by the consent of the people’s representatives for a proper public purpose. That is the foundation of the Origination Clause.
.

Given
these roots, it should come as no surprise that, at the time of the
Founding, several of the state constitutions vested in their lower
legislative houses the prerogative of, in the words of Georgia’s
constitution, initiating “bills for raising revenue or appropriating
moneys.” Indeed, in famously supporting colonial opposition to the Stamp
Act in 1765, William Pitt observed, “The Commons of America, represented in their several assemblies, have ever been in possession of the exercise of this their constitutional right of giving and granting their own money. They would have been slaves if they had not enjoyed it” (emphasis added).
.

Maryland’s
lower house, to take one example, was responsible for initiating “money
bills,” which were defined as “every bill, assessing, levying, or
applying taxes or supplies, for the support of government, or the
current expenses of the State, or appropriating money in the treasury”
(emphasis added). In Massachusetts, the home of Elbridge Gerry,
colonial practice was that taxes and “money bills” were the privilege of
the House of Representatives, with the upper house empowered only to
concur or not concur. The Commonwealth’s 1780 constitution, adumbrating
the federal Constitution’s Origination Clause, mandated that “money
bills shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate
may propose or concur with amendments, as on other bills.”
.

Let’s move directly to the 1787 convention in Philadelphia.
One
of the major challenges confronting the delegates was to broker the
competing claims of small and large states. As Franklin summarized, “If a
proportional representation takes place, the small States contend that
their liberties will be in danger. If an equality of votes is to be put
in its place, the large States say their money will be in danger.” This
resulted, of course, in the great compromise: equality among states in
the Senate and proportional representation (by population) in the House.
But this arrangement was inadequate to quell the large states’ fears;
it was also necessary to tinker with the powers assigned to the two
chambers. As Franklin put it, the Senate would be restricted

generally in all appropriations & dispositions of money to be drawn out of the General Treasury;
and in all laws for supplying that Treasury, the Delegates of the
several States shall have suffrage in proportion to the Sums which their
respective States do actually contribute to the Treasury [emphasis
added].

When the Origination Clause was
specifically taken up, a spirited debate ensued, with some delegates
protesting against restrictions on the Senate. According to Madison’s
records, however, what “generally prevailed” was the argument of George
Mason:

The
consideration which weighed with the Committee was that the 1st branch
[i.e., the House of Representatives] would be the immediate
representatives of the people, the 2nd [the Senate] would not. Should
the latter have the power of giving away the people’s money, they might soon forget the source from whence they received it [emphasis added]. We might soon have an Aristocracy.

Mason’s
concerns seem prescient in our era of mammoth national government
presided over by an entrenched ruling class of professional politicians.
He worried that

the
Senate is not like the H. of Representatives chosen frequently and
obliged to return frequently among the people. They are chosen by the
Sts for 6 years, will probably settle themselves at the seat of
Government, will pursue schemes for their aggrandizement. . . . If the
Senate can originate, they will in the recess of the Legislative
Sessions, hatch their mischievous projects, for their own purposes, and
have their money bills ready cut & dried, (to use a common phrase)
for the meeting of the H. of Representatives. . . . The purse strings
should be in the hands of the Representatives of the people.

Yes, the purse strings,
not just the power to tax. Concededly, the Origination Clause speaks of
bills “for raising revenue.” In selling the Constitution to the nation,
though, it was portrayed as securing in the hands of the people’s
representatives the power of the purse. It is an empty power if spending is not included.
The relevant paragraph in Madison’s Federalist No. 58 is worth quoting in full (all italics mine):

A
constitutional and infallible resource still remains with the larger
states by which they will be able at all times to accomplish their just
purposes. The
House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose
the supplies requisite for the support of government. They, in a word,
hold the purse
— that powerful instrument by which we behold, in the history of the
British constitution, an infant and humble representation of the people gradually
enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally
reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all overgrown prerogatives
of the other branches of the government. This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the
most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm
the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of
every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary
measure.

To my mind, what Madison describes
unquestionably transcends taxing authority. I believe a “complete and
effectual weapon . . . for obtaining a redress of every grievance” must
give “the immediate representatives of the people” the power to block
funding for a government takeover of health care that was enacted by
fraud and strong-arming; that was adamantly represented not to be the
tax that the Supreme Court later found it to be; and that is
substantially opposed by the people, and has been since its enactment.
.

Matt
begs to differ, relying on the text of the Origination Clause, the
reductive construction of “revenue” as mere “taxation,” and Joseph
Story’s Commentaries. This is reasonable, and — as Matt has
emphasized — it certainly reflects conventional Washington wisdom. But I
do not think it gets to the power of the purse that the Framers — and
Madison, quite explicitly — were driving at.
In fact, Story’s
conclusion that the origination power “has been confined to bills to
levy taxes in the strict sense of the word,” and not to ordinary
legislation “which may incidentally create revenue,” is an overly narrow
interpretation of the clause’s meaning, arrived at by taking out of
context a portion of the delegates’ debate that related to two
tangential concerns about potential abuse of the origination power.
Specifically, Madison worried that the Origination Clause could be read
too broadly, thus hampering the Senate’s ability to originate any
legislation — since most federal legislation would surely have some
conceivable economic consequence. Relatedly, other delegates worried
that the House could abuse its origination power by tacking non-revenue
legislation onto money bills in order to frustrate the Senate’s ability
to make amendments.
.

The
Framers wanted to endow the House with the power of the purse, but did
not want to open the door to such shenanigans. Thus the fleeting focus
on “incidental” levies: The debates fleshed out the principle that the
Origination Clause was intended to apply to bills the patent purpose of which involved public money.
That hardly meant, as Story inferred, that the Clause would only ever
apply to “bills to levy taxes in the strict sense.” It meant that, in
the peculiar situation of ordinary legislation that only incidentally
raised money, the Senate would not be impeded by the clause from either
initiating or amending such a bill.
.

I would also note that
constricting the House’s Origination Clause power to taxation would
render it a nullity — which, admittedly, is how modern Washington treats
it. If the Senate is freely permitted to originate appropriations that
increase our already olympian debt through more borrowing, it is
effectively originating taxation every bit as much as if it forthrightly
branded as “taxation” the bills thus initiated.
.

Two final points.
.First, I have no illusions that, at
this late hour, the Senate would passively accept the premise that the
House holds the full power of the purse, or that somewhere down the road
the courts would enforce this principle. But each component of our
government has the power and, I’d submit, the duty to construe its own
constitutional authority in good faith. I am saying that if Republicans
truly want to make good on a pledge to reinvigorate originalism, the
House should be guided by Madison in its dealings with the Senate. That
would make for some contentious times (similar to what we are witnessing
now), but so what? Our system is based on the expectation that
officials will vigorously exercise their quite intentionally separate
and competing powers. The resolution of the inevitable collisions should
be more a political process guided by constitutional principles than a
legal process determined by courts. The former is how compromise and
consensus properly emerge..

Second, there is some very interesting
Origination Clause litigation ongoing against Obamacare, and it involves
a construction of the clause that both Matt and I would probably find
legitimate. Representative Trent Franks (R., Ariz.) and other House
conservatives claim that the so-called Affordable Care Act violates the
clause because it was a tax-hiking bill (as the Supreme Court has held)
that originated in the Senate.There will be much more to say
about this legal challenge. I believe it will be less abstract and less
contentious than our debate over the theoretical extent to which the
Origination Clause reposes in the House the power of the purse.
.

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About Me

A Texan who loves the truth and hates the lying, cheating, and deliberate prevarication that characterizes so much of our civic discourse these days.
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RIPOSTE, n. 1. Fencing: a quick thrust after parrying a lunge 2. a quick sharp return in speech or action; counterstroke.
- The Random House Dictionary of the English Language...........
You can contact me by sending an email to me at: leorugiens23@gmail.com